On Sat, Dec 15, 2007 at 11:14:45PM -0800, SJS wrote: >begin quoting John H. Robinson, IV as of Sat, Dec 15, 2007 at 10:54:38PM >-0800: >> Stewart Stremler wrote: >> > >> > The promise of hardware RAID (for me) was transparency -- but this >> > was never delivered, so far as I know. You had to have a RAID-aware >> > OS to use hardware RAID, instead of having a device that could >> > transparently give you RAID benefits on "legacy" and small systems. >> >> Managed raid array. I've used them, and all that is exposed to the >> system is a block level device. The specific one I used was a Fiber >> Channel device, but it had a SCSI equivalent. >> >> You had to telnet into the array to configure it. >> >> IIRC, it was a Sun T300. I know that it was a beta name, and got changed >> to T3 or something. > >Ah, okay. Big-system stuff. > >I don't think I was looking at the $10k and up stuff at the time. >Perhaps that was my mistake.
you can get a very nice 2 channel 4Gb FC 16 bay sata-II enclosure that supports raid-6 et al from caeneng.com (by infotrend) for a lot less than 10K, depending on the number of drives maybe half that, UFS on it is wicked fast ;), scsi should cost less. blinkenlights, led console, web, email, snmp, serial, telnet, etc mngt interface. not exactly how I'd design it, but it gets everything done with little/no trouble. apple sells a re-branded 2Gb LSI FC card for $350 IIRC. >> The RAID cards that I am using now don't require any host OS driver. You >> configure it by hitting F3 during the boot process, and managing that >> way. However, there is no way to know if a particular disk is suffering >> degradation unless your host system has the proper driver. > >That's what blinkenlights are for. :) > >> I forget the exact model number, but these are 3Ware SATA RAID cards. > >...as in a controller card that plugs into a slot? > >Wouldn't a driver still be needed? there is a BSD driver for Areca SATA-II hardware raid controllers (arc) that supports hot swap and is OS manageable. It was written for OpenBSD, ported to FreeBSD and I have good information that the port to NetBSD is done, but it's not publically available just yet. Not sure of Linux support for that one. BTW - re netbsd you can find the feature list here http://netbsd.org/about/features.html I seem to recall it was the fastest SMP around, but in any event, the present SMP work (head) for the 5 release should be an improvement. // George -- George Georgalis, information system scientist <IXOYE>< -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
